SoA .BAD @soabad

Happy Holi!
Time again for the festival of colors in India :)

"Holi - also known as the Festival of Colours, Festival of Spring, and Festival of Love, is one of the most popular and significant festivals in Hinduism. It celebrates the eternal and divine love of the god Radha and Krishna."

Visit Shanti to learn a bit about this fun annual happening in India and take home some color textures and effects - the Holi spot is right next to the welcome area.

Thank you @CuteulalaArtis I appreciated the help today setting up your excellent red coaster on our Catena di isole beach. Please stop by anytime and ride this great coaster it is thrilling! You have a great view riding it with nice photo opportunities!

The Phantom Rose Mer Nation has a new region - Phantom Rose Medieval! The Underwater Kingdom of Lyonesse, is located on this new 5x5 Medieval/Fantasy region. Hop via the Akrotiri beacon and then use the Mer Portal (medieval) to access via underwater.

The latest Mer area for the Grid: The Underwater Kingdom of Lyonesse! There is a free gift of a shark rider, along with temp-rez shark riders to use on the region. Bring some friends and compete at the Colosseum in Seahorse Chariot races. 6 colors, who will win? You can also use the Colosseum for Mer swim racing, unlimited number of competitors!

Many of you know I have a lot of statues in my store, but I didn't set out originally to offer them. A few years ago I wanted one for a build I was doing at the time and found one on the Kitely Market. Wanting to add materials, I replaced the base texture with a marble and realized that all that was left was an amorphous blob that barely resembled the original statue. So I decided to see if there was a better way. The resulting workflow is pictured. I start out with real world scans of famous statues (such as Hebe pictured) that are readily available, and load it into Blender. Since it had 2 million faces, I needed to reduce the complexity to 80,000 faces or less to be able to upload it inworld but still have detail for those who are unable to use higher graphics. You can see the two models side-by-side in Blender. At that point I bake the normals to replace a lot of the details that were lost without increasing the complexity, then upload the less complex model and the new normalmap into opensim. The final photo is the result.

You can see all my statues on my store regions:

Main Store: grid.wolfterritories.org:8002:Lunaria Emporium - Main Store

Kitely Store: grid.kitely.com:8002:Lunaria Emporium

And many of my items are available on the Kitely Market here: https://www.kitely.com/market?store=13957705